Some ORDA workshops have already been held for the fall 2009 semester. The following are the remaining workshops. Additional workshops may be scheduled as the academic year progresses; if so, they will be announced on our home page and in Research Matters.

Unless otherwise noted, all workshops are scheduled to be held in room C-227 in Woody Hall. For all workshops, we recommend that you reserve a seat. Contact ORDA (453-4540, orda@siu.edu) to reserve a seat.

Faculty Seed Grant Program Workshops

—excerpted from The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Aug. 20, 2009

—excerpted from The New York Times, Aug. 18, 2009

A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at top medical schools have been attaching their names to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies….Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the problem or to hold faculty members to account. Those universities may not have much longer before they find themselves in trouble. With a letter last week, Senator Charles Grassley, who helps oversee funding for medical research, signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting and is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Many doctors depend on federal grants to support their work, and attaching fresh conditions to those grants could be a powerful lever for enforcing new ethical guidelines on the universities.

The full scope of the ghostwriting problem is still unclear, but recent revelations suggest that the practice is widespread. Dozens of medical education companies across the country draft scientific papers at the behest of drug makers. And placing such papers in medical journals has become a fundamental marketing practice for most of the large pharmaceutical companies.

Allegations of industry-sponsored ghostwriting date back at least a decade. But evidence of the breadth of the practice has come to light only gradually, most recently in documents released in litigation over menopause drugs made by Wyeth. The documents offer a look at DesignWrite, a medical writing company hired by Wyeth to prepare about 60 articles favorable to its hormone drugs. In one publication plan, DesignWrite wrote that the goal of the Wyeth articles was to de-emphasize the risk of breast cancer associated with hormone drugs, promote the drugs as beneficial, and blunt competing drugs. The articles were published in journals between 1998 and 2005—continuing even though a federal study was suspended in 2002 after researchers found that menopausal women who took certain hormones had an increased risk of breast cancer and heart disease.

Many universities are slow to react to evidence about the practice. Last December, Mr. Grassley released documents indicating that DesignWrite had drafted an article that was published under the name of a professor at NYU's School of Medicine. Eight months later, an NYU spokeswoman said the school had not looked into the matter. "If we had received a complaint, we would have investigated." She added that faculty members are responsible for the integrity of their own work. But some bioethicists say that medical schools must take responsibility for faculty members whose publications do not explicitly acknowledge the work of writers receiving industry support. Such subsidized articles allow pharmaceutical companies to use the imprimatur of respected academics to increase sales of certain drugs, ultimately skewing patient care.…

In one measure of the extent of the problem, the medical school of Columbia is home to three professors who were authors of Wyeth-financed articles. The three are also recipients of NIH grants, according to Mr. Grassley. A new policy at Columbia took effect in January. It prohibits medical school faculty, trainees, and students from being authors or co-authors of articles written by employees of commercial entities if the author's name or Columbia title is used without substantive contribution. The policy requires any article written with a for-profit company to include full disclosure of the role of each author, as well as any other industry contribution.

For more information about these programs, contact Joel Fritzler, ORDA Information Specialist, at 453-4530 or jcfritz@siu.edu.

The National Science Foundation's Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) program seeks to reveal new understanding about the properties that systems of people and computers together possess, and to develop a practical understanding of the purposeful design of systems to facilitate socially intelligent computing. By better characterizing, understanding, and eventually designing for desired behaviors arising from computationally mediated groups of people at all scales, new forms of knowledge creation, new models of computation, new forms of culture, and new types of interaction will result. Further, the investigation of such systems and their emergent behaviors and desired properties will inform the design of future systems.

The SoCS program will support research in socially intelligent computing arising from human-computer partnerships that range in scale from a single person and computer to an Internet-scale array of machines and people. The program seeks to create new knowledge about the capabilities these partnerships can demonstrate—new affordances and new emergent behaviors, as well as unanticipated consequences and fundamental limits. The program also seeks to foster new ideas that support even greater capabilities for socially intelligent computing, such as the design and development of systems reflecting explicit knowledge about people's cognitive and social abilities, new models of collective, social, and participatory computing, and new algorithms that leverage the specific abilities of massive numbers of human participants.

The Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation has established the Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) to serve a critical role in focusing on important emerging areas in a timely manner. The EFRI Office is launching a new funding opportunity for interdisciplinary teams of researchers to embark on rapidly advancing frontiers of fundamental engineering research. For this solicitation, it will consider proposals that aim to investigate emerging frontiers in the following two specific research areas: (1) Renewable Energy Storage (RESTOR), and (2) Science in Energy and Environmental Design (SEED): Engineering Sustainable Buildings. This solicitation will be coordinated with the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. EFRI seeks proposals with transformative ideas that represent an opportunity for a significant shift in fundamental engineering knowledge with a strong potential for long-term impact on national needs or a grand challenge. The proposals must also meet the detailed requirements delineated in this solicitation.

Through this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), the Center to Reduce Cancer Health Disparities (CRCHD) and the Division of Cancer Biology (DCB) at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) are inviting cooperative agreement research (U01) grant applications from investigators interested in conducting basic research studies into the causes and mechanisms of cancer health disparities. These awards will support pilot and feasibility studies, development and testing of new methodologies, secondary data analyses, and innovative mechanistic studies that investigate biological/genetic bases of cancer health disparities. This FOA is also designed to aid and facilitate the growth of a nationwide cohort of scientists with a high level of basic research expertise in cancer health disparities research who can develop resources and tools, such as biospecimens, cell lines, and methods that are necessary to conduct basic research in cancer health disparities.

The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) are encouraging NIH Research Demonstration and Dissemination Project grant (R18) applications from institutions/organizations to test the effectiveness of interventions for the prevention and control of diabetes and obesity that have a high potential to be adopted, and sustained in applied health care settings. The approaches tested must be based on widely accepted interventions previously demonstrated to be efficacious in clinical trials. Research must target the prevention or reversal of obesity, prevention of type 2 diabetes, improved care of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, or the prevention or delay of the complications of these conditions. The interventions proposed under this FOA should have the potential to be widely disseminated to clinical practice, individuals, and communities at risk.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

• Strategies to enhance glycemic control and reduce risk factors for the development of the complications of type 1 or type 2 diabetes such as hypertension and dyslipidemia;
• Studies that test innovative approaches to promote the adoption and maintenance of behavior change shown to reduce obesity, prevent diabetes, or improve diabetes outcomes;
• Studies that test approaches that might lead to the long-term maintenance of weight loss and prevention of weight regain after weight loss;
• Studies to prevent excess weight gain at key points across the lifespan, particularly in children, adolescents, and young adults;
• Studies to test innovative approaches for adoption of self-management strategies that improve glycemic control;
• Studies that test family based interventions to treat obesity in children and adolescents in clinical practice or community settings;
• Strategies to overcome health care system barriers that reduce the efficiency or effectiveness of patient/provider interactions and lead to improved health outcomes;
• Studies that test innovative approaches to promote weight loss before and after pregnancy in women with a history of gestational diabetes.

The goal of this program is to stimulate both basic and policy-relevant research about the early education, health, and well-being of children living in immigrant families from birth to age 10, particularly those who are living in low-income families. The program will support young investigators, from the behavioral and social sciences or in an allied professional field, who are untenured but in tenure-track positions or who have received tenure in the last four years from a college or university in the United States.

Research areas of interest are limited to the following: (1) factors (e.g., individual, familial, cultural, neighborhood) contributing to both positive and negative outcomes for young immigrant children in their communities and schools, (2) individual and group identity formation among young children from a variety of groups living in different environments, (3) the experiences of newcomer children in early education, kindergarten, and elementary school programs, (4) language development among immigrant children, and (5) evaluation of the impact of public policies in health and in education that affect the life prospects of newcomer children.

Applicants must hold a Ph.D. or its equivalent in one of the behavioral and social sciences or in an allied professional field (e.g., public policy, public health, education, social work, nursing, medicine). Eligible researchers will have earned their doctoral degrees within the last 15 years prior to June 30, 2009, and be full-time faculty members of a college or university in the United States.

The Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) funds research on organic farming and food systems and the dissemination of these research results to the greater agricultural community. Proposals must involve farmers or ranchers in project design and implementation and take place on working organic farms or ranches whenever possible. Additionally, proposals should articulate how the proposed research project will foster the improvement or adoption of organic farming systems.

This request for proposals is open to any agricultural production, social, economic, or policy-related topic of concern to organic farmers and ranchers. OFRF also has special funding available for organic fruit research. OFRF supports research that is relevant to and takes place in certified organic systems. OFRF does not normally fund studies that compare conventional with organic systems as a primary objective.

Additionally, OFRF has identified the following as areas of particular interest: (1) organic livestock systems, (2) economic constraints and opportunities relevant to the viability of small- and medium-scale organic farms and ranches, and (3) projects that investigate the interactions between components of organic systems and that take a systems-management (rather than an input-substitution) approach to solving production problems.

OFRF funds only projects in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. It particularly encourages farmers, ranchers, researchers, and extension personnel to consider applying for funding.